Simon & Shuster | featured news

Jaycee Dugard, a Northern California woman who was kidnapped at 11 years old and held captive for almost two decades, will apparently release a biography published by Simon & Shuster this summer, Fox40.com reported. “A Stolen Life,” a 256-page memoir, will have a July 12th release, and was written solely by Dugard.

Amanda Hocking, the 26-year-old author who shot to fame by selling more than a million copies of her self-published books, has signed up with a traditional publisher for her next series.St. Martin’s Press, part of Macmillan, will publish Ms. Hocking’s “Watersong” series, four books in the young-adult paranormal genre.A heated auction for the rights to publish her books began early last week, and several major publishers, including Random House, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins, dropped out as the price climbed into the seven figures.

Author Frank McCourt, whose tragic childhood became creative grist for his first book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Angela's Ashes," died Sunday, according to the Web site of his publisher, Simon & Shuster.